Louise Moser
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Abstract

Service oriented computing and Web Services are transforming the World Wide Web from a publishing platform into a distributed computing platform, resulting in more and more business activities being conducted online. A business activity typically involves one or more atomic transactions, and requires coordination within and between the transactions of the business activity. For such coordination services to be widely adopted, they must be trustworthy, i.e., provide a high degree of security and reliability for their users. In this talk, we will consider possible threats to such coordination services, and will present defenses against such threats. In particular, we will discuss encryption/authentication and lightweight Byzantine fault tolerance techniques that can be used to render the standard Web Services Atomic Transaction and Business Activity specifications trustworthy for their users.

Biography

 Louise Moser is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests span the areas of distributed systems, computer networks, and software engineering. Dr. Moser has served as principal investigator for many funded research projects, including projects from NSF, DARPA, AFOSR, UC Micro and UC Discovery, and has supervised more than 100 graduate student researchers. The systems software that she has supervised include the Trans/Total, Totem, AtomicGroup and IntraGroup reliable ordered multicast group communication systems, the Realize real-time and fault tolerance infrastructure for distributed systems, the Eternal fault tolerance and live upgrade infrastructure for distributed systems, the PluggableFT fault tolerance infrastructure for distributed systems, and the Magnet infrastructure for mobile e-commerce agents. Dr. Moser has served as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Computers and an area editor for IEEE Computer magazine in the area of networks, and on numerous conference program committees. She has participated in various standards organizations, including the Object Management Group, the Java Community Process, and the Service Availability Forum where she served as editor of the Application Interface Specification. She has published more than 225 conference and journal publications, and has 10 patents granted or pending. Previously, at SRI International, she was a key contributor to the design verification of the Software-Implemented Fault-Tolerant (SIFT) reliable aircraft control computer. She received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.